NFL’s bounty-for-injury scandal

One of the things we enjoy about professional football, frankly, is its violence. And as players get bigger and faster and meaner, we like it more and more. Still, we have ideals of sportsmanship. When a player gets hurt, both sides respectfully applaud as he gets carted off the field, and when it looks like a spinal injury, everyone piously says, “our prayers are with him.” But now it turns out that at least one team (and probably more) has been paying bounties for injuring players on the other team. The rate was $1,500 for inflicting a “cart off” injury. One player (not a coach) reportedly offered $10,000 for anyone who would put Brett Favre out of the game. The NFL came down hard on the New Orleans Saints, the team that formalized such bonuses, suspending their coach, assistant coach, a former coach, and even the general manager.

Thomas Boswell, one of the better sportswriters, acknowledges the cognitive dissonance between the appeal of the sport’s violence and the sense of going too far.

The NFL is in a fight for its soul, or maybe for its life. And it knows it.

We won’t grasp for a decade, maybe not for a generation, just how big a problem the NFL has in the wake of its pay-for-injury bounty scandal; which comes on the heels of studies showing the long-term brain damage caused by repetitive blows to the head, even in youth football; which comes on top of lawsuits by former NFL players who feel that premature bad health, mental illness or death may be related to the league’s disregard for their safety.

That’s a mouthful. But there’s a reason. The NFL’s half-century rise to power and profits has always been tied to its limited concern, tantamount to a lack of accountability, for the damage done to its athletes. Violence and danger are a core component of the NFL product. Too much safety is bad for business. . . .

Eventually, as players got bigger, faster and stronger, but the game’s rules and equipment couldn’t keep pace, an inflection point, and a crisis, had to arrive. Once a sport decides that too many quarterbacks and stars are being broken, and that you finally have to calibrate your carnage, how do you control that process, especially when you discover that a Super Bowl champion offers bounties for injuries — and that they won’t stop, even when the entire league threatens them? You can’t. You just cope with the crash.

The distance between old-fashioned hard-hitting and outright dirty play has always been bright as orange paint to anyone who ever actually played. If you hear an ex-NFL player say it’s a “fine line,” what you’ve learned is that he’s lived in the belly of the big-time football beast for much too long.

However, what we’ve got on our plate now is miles beyond such tame fare. There is a 100-yard-wide “line” between occasional dirty play and what the Saints did: a complete chain-of-command endorsement of trying to inflict “cart-off” level injuries ($1,500 each) with late hits, blows to the head and shots at the knees — all against the rules — all tolerated or even cheered.

The NFL’s corporate response — kneecap the Saints — falls squarely within the sport’s “pragmatic” traditions. Once the general public changes its opinion of the basic nature of a sport, and decides that it’s fundamentally uncomfortable with the values that the game represents, many things can change. Slow but inexorable go together. . . .

A sport’s flaw becomes a huge problem if it is also a central driver of its popularity. Of team sports, only football suffers from this combination. The more you remove fear and danger, the more you undercut the NFL’s power. Nobody pays to watch touch football.

The NFL is now at its crossroads. Can the sport find the right rules, the improved equipment, the necessary culture change — like the massacre of the Saints — to create a new balance between terror and some semblance of safety and honorable play?

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Professor of Literature at Patrick Henry College, the Director of the Cranach Institute at Concordia Theological Seminary, a columnist for World Magazine and TableTalk, and the author of 18 books on different facets of Christianity & Culture.

Pete

Soccer

Pete

Soccer

Cincinnatus

The only thing that keeps football from descending into the sort of violence typical of medieval street games (or even gladiatorial combat) is the waning mores of the people. This is why sports predicated on violence, like football, are arguably pernicious.

/I still watch football, but we should recognize the equivalences.

Cincinnatus

The only thing that keeps football from descending into the sort of violence typical of medieval street games (or even gladiatorial combat) is the waning mores of the people. This is why sports predicated on violence, like football, are arguably pernicious.

/I still watch football, but we should recognize the equivalences.

Jon

Any idea what that would look like?

The ethos of competitive sportsmanship marked by the 1960s to 1980s era NFL, combined modern equipment.

That, and ObamaCare will help the players, too, for sure.

Jon

Any idea what that would look like?

The ethos of competitive sportsmanship marked by the 1960s to 1980s era NFL, combined modern equipment.

That, and ObamaCare will help the players, too, for sure.

Cincinnatus

Jon@3,

“ObamaCare will help the players, too, for sure.”

Uh, how? Was that sarcasm?

I agree with you otherwise, though: only an ethos of human sportsmanship can prevent the sport from descending into bloodsport.

Cincinnatus

Jon@3,

“ObamaCare will help the players, too, for sure.”

Uh, how? Was that sarcasm?

I agree with you otherwise, though: only an ethos of human sportsmanship can prevent the sport from descending into bloodsport.

http://enterthevein.wordpress.com J. Dean

Lose the padding. Believe it or not, you’re less likely to receive a serious injury in rugby than you are football, because the lack of pads and helmets dissuades defensive players from overly and unnecessarily violent hits.

http://enterthevein.wordpress.com J. Dean

Lose the padding. Believe it or not, you’re less likely to receive a serious injury in rugby than you are football, because the lack of pads and helmets dissuades defensive players from overly and unnecessarily violent hits.

TE Schroeder

J. Dean @5 — I disagree. Football was played without the padding before. Deaths occurred. Pres. Teddy Roosevelt almost banned the game because of it. Remove the padding and the violence will not decline, not with the size and speed of the current players who get paid millions to do what they do. The better they do it, the higher the pay.

If you added the money to rugby that you have in the NFL, you would probably see a graphic rise in violent collisions and severe injuries because there will be a serious incentive to be the biggest, fastest, toughest, hardest-hitting rugby player the world has seen. Many will pay to see it; and others will get paid very well to inflict it.

TE Schroeder

J. Dean @5 — I disagree. Football was played without the padding before. Deaths occurred. Pres. Teddy Roosevelt almost banned the game because of it. Remove the padding and the violence will not decline, not with the size and speed of the current players who get paid millions to do what they do. The better they do it, the higher the pay.

If you added the money to rugby that you have in the NFL, you would probably see a graphic rise in violent collisions and severe injuries because there will be a serious incentive to be the biggest, fastest, toughest, hardest-hitting rugby player the world has seen. Many will pay to see it; and others will get paid very well to inflict it.

DonS

“Any idea what that would look like?” — yep. Flag football

DonS

“Any idea what that would look like?” — yep. Flag football

http://www.toddstadler.com/ tODD

TE (@6), so … capitalism gives rise to barbarism?

I’m not necessarily disputing that claim, but I don’t think it’s one that a lot of right-wingers would agree with.

http://www.toddstadler.com/ tODD

TE (@6), so … capitalism gives rise to barbarism?

I’m not necessarily disputing that claim, but I don’t think it’s one that a lot of right-wingers would agree with.

http://www.redeemedrambling.blogspot.com/ John

J Dean is statistically correct. Although, when injuries do occur in rugby, the combatants are often life-flighted from the field.

http://www.redeemedrambling.blogspot.com/ John

J Dean is statistically correct. Although, when injuries do occur in rugby, the combatants are often life-flighted from the field.